Categories: "Wildlife Photography"

I usually see Fox Squirrels and Chipmunks around my house, but this summer this Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) has been resident in my backyard. He (or she) can steal a bird feeder full of sunflower seed in a single afternoon (somewhere nearby a few kilos of bird food is stashed away.) He "sings" for prolonged periods of time - up to an hour - sometimes chanting "chock-chock-chock" over and over from the top of the fence, sometimes sitting in trees improvising a mix of bird-like tweets with squirrelly scolding. He's not much larger than a chipmunk but unlike them he consistently outwits the resident cat.

Red Squirrel

A quick hand-held grab shot from this morning as the squirrel was serenading from the tree branches. Pentax K3, Tokina ATX 400mm f5.6.

Spent some time visiting the Charleston, South Carolina area last week. It was a nice change from Michigan's snowy March! Here's a grab shot of a little alligator (maybe 4 to 5 feet long) sunning itself on the edge of a pond at Magnolia Gardens:

Yesterday I visited a favorite pond in the Allegan Forest. For years I knew the pond as a seasonal marsh which went dry every summer, but over the past decade or so it has steadily filled up with water and no longer goes dry. It is host to an enormous number of dragonflies and also frogs, toads, turtles and more. Periodically, a huge number of these tiny toads flood the grassy savannah near the pond:

Eastern American Toad, Anaxyrus americanus

This is an Eastern American Toad, Anaxyrus americanus. It was quite small, roughly comparable to a US one cent piece in size. Here is a very crude comparison shot:

Size Comparison of Small Toad to US One Cent Piece

The field was teeming with these little toads yesterday, something that happens now and then in late spring or early summer. There were literally thousands of these tiny creatures making their way through the fields and into the adjacent woods.

I was sitting my garden a few weeks ago and spotted a hummingbird among the flowers - a rare site in my urban environ. I came back a few minutes later with camera and a 400mm lens. The hummingbird did not return but after a while I heard a rustling overhead and saw this chickadee hanging on the the downspout…

So I managed to put the long lens to good use after all!

Pentax K-3, Tokina ATX 400 f5.6. Click on the image for a much larger file.

Doing some yard work around the house today I noticed a male goldfinch eating seeds out of a sunflower. Since the sunflower was only a few feet from the driveway I pulled the car in, rolled own the window, and took a few shots…

I am currently exhibiting several prints in the gallery space at the Transformations Spirituality Center in Nazareth, Michigan. Here are a few highlights of the exhibit (click on the images for a larger file):

Hidey Hole Chipmunk

Forest Floor Still Life

Wild Columbine

Halloween Pennant

Snow Crystal

If you are around or near Kalamazoo, stop by and see the images - they will be up till late March, 2014.

I recently received my Pentax K-3 and have been eager to test its high resolution, 24 megapixel sensor. This morning I had a few spare minutes and mounted a Tokina ATX 400mm f5.6 lens onto the K-3, along with an AF360FGZ flash for fill light. Then it was off to the bird feeder to snap some test photos of house sparrows having their breakfast. Here are some of the results, with actual pixel images below the full frame shots (click on the smaller image for a larger view: )

I went into this exercise with several questions in mind. Here is what I learned:
How would the Tokina ATX 400 work on the Pentax K-3? I wondered if this older lens, designed for film cameras, had the resolution and edge sharpness to work well on the K-3s high resolution, 24 megapixel sensor. Judging from the images - detail and sharpness is quite good, IMO. The backlit shot of the bird on the peanut wreath showed a small bit of color fringing, but that was easily corrected in Photoshop.

I should comment that while I have always considered this lens to be very good, it falls short of being truly excellent. Not to bash it - the sample I am using now was purchased used for a few hundred dollars. (My original copy developed a bad case of fungus.) So - I am hopeful that many older lenses from the film era will do just fine on the the K-3. (Good news for those of use with many older lenses from the film era….)

Shake reduction: Seems to have worked exceptionally well. While shutter speeds were in the 1/750 to 1/1000 range, for the equivalent of a 600mm (full frame) lens, the percentage of sharp images in this hand held exercise was quite good.
How would the K-3’s auto focus perform? AF was quite fast and accurate. It even tracked the moving birds pretty well, with minimal hunting. Overall, it was quite an improvement over the K-5 and earlier models that I have used – BUT the cam driven AF was as loud as ever.

How well did the camera handle white balance? The camera was set to AWB mode. The morning sun was still quite reddish when I shot these images. In shots where the flash did not fire the white balance looks very good. When the flash did fire the images have a noticeable greenish cast. This was easily corrected but suggests that the AWB adjustment for the flash is a bit off. (No surprise but the AF360 FGZ was underpowered for fill flash use in this case.)

How did the K-3’s metering perform? The camera was set to the new evaluative metering process, and performed excellently. Many of the birds were splashed with sun with a background that was in shadow, and the K-3’s metering adjusted the exposure to avoid any blown out highlights in the bird. However, some of the birds in the backlit shots were a bit underexposed, though this was easily addressed in post.
And what about image noise? All of these shots were taken at ISO 800. In general, noise is minimal. However, in backlit shots where the exposure was adjusted in ACR, some noise emerges. (See the image of the bird on the green peanut holder above) Probably not as noise-free as the K-5, though a much larger image size.

And lastly – How many files fit on a 32 gig card? I shot 441 images in the 20 minutes or so that I worked on it. Based on how much they filled the card, I would expect to get 760 images on one 32 gig card.

Overall – I’m pretty happy with the results here, given that it was an unplanned test, hand held, with a relatively inexpensive and old lens. When used properly, the K-3 will probably shine even more.

(Since this is tagged as a review I should comment that I am not employed by or paid by Ricoh / Pentax in any manner and bought the camera retail.)